Children of nerds don't stand a chance

Ana has reached an important nerd milestone -- she now owns her first piece of home electronics. I didn't own my first electronic gadget (a TI computer I got for Christmas) until I was 6. Dad is a pretty big nerd, but mom's lack of nerdiness delayed me a little bit.

Ana was just 4 days past 17 months when I took her to Best Buy this weekend to pickup her very own DVD player. Her favorite thing to do in the living room is to open up DVD cases and then swap out the discs in the player. If we let her she'd stand next to the tv and swap out discs all day -- she doesn't really care about watching the shows. The disk switching was always something that made me cringe since the DVD player was part of a small home theater system that let us have surround sound for movies. If the tray on the DVD player were to break the system would be useless, and Ana hasn't quite gotten the hang of doing something "gently".

Since Ana doesn't approve of my movies the surround sound wasn't getting much use, so I packed up the player and put the little $30 DVD player that could in its place. It is working great and Ana approves of the switch. She's got new remote to play with and doesn't have to listen to me say, "be careful!" every time she switches shows... what's not to love!

The poor girl is going to be a nerd before she hits elementary school.

Definition of sucks

sucks (adj.), any circumstance or series of events that lead one to be at work at 6am on a Saturday.

The definition said it all. Machine died yesterday and since I have Sara's Wedding this afternoon and can't stay on campus to help deal with it (oh darn) I volunteered to be the first one to check on the system and start the recovery process. The machine is still trying to recover itself though, so I'm waiting on campus for a while.

On my way to campus I drove past Kyle Field. The Transportation Services folks were already blocking parking lots and doing their gameday duties. I also spotted an unusual group carrying what looked like picket signs across the vacant parking lots. My first thought -- which is a sad reflection of the state of student involvement on campus -- was, "Wait. This is A&M. No one gets worked up enough to protest here." You can pay a coach more than twice his predecessor, let him turn in the first losing seasons in the past 20 years and lose a bowl game badly and students on campus still love the guy. That's a story for another time.

I realized then that I was correct. These weren't protestors. These folks are the dedicated Ags getting the good seats to try to worm their way into the background of ESPN's College Gameday broadcast. Good luck to them, and good luck to the Ags this evening.

I'll find something fun to post about soon, I promise.